Church and theology

What I want to know is, where did the cartoonist go to school to learn how to draw pervert parents? His abusive father looks like Richard M. Nixon reimagined as a vinyl-record store clerk.

Heh heh. But it’s quite another to accurately name the goggles that gives this cartoonist such weird visions. And as I struggled to describe the myopia that afflicts that cartoonist, a comment on another post on this very blog helped me tremendously:

Evolution may technically be a “theory,” but it sure does seem to fit the data. On the other hand, every single thing in the Bible has been scientifically proven to be absolutely factual, so evolution theory MUST be wrong! Whew, I’m glad I reasoned that out.

But what does creationism have to do with a cartoon about abusive homeschoolers? Why would the commenter lump these seemingly disparate subjects together?

The answer is simply: It’s the same subject: Christendom.

The scariest army to the ungodly isn’t North Korean or Russian or even the faceless hatred of al Qaida.

It’s an army of faithful Christians, uncontrolled and unseen by the authorities and marching beneath the same awesome banner.

The statement smacks down the idea of homosexual marriage pretty hard. But I find it odd that the statement does not include a lot of Christian distinctives. There is no mention of the Trinity. There is no mention of the fact that marriage is a shadow of Christ’s love for His Church.

Are we in the PCA trying to find Jewish and Muslim allies with this non-Trinitarian statement? If we are, should we be?

A long-distance friend sent me an email asking me if I had read Tim LaHaye’s “Mind Siege.” My friend said:

What a tour de force on the destruction of Christian culture. Perhaps a little reactionary, but I’m enjoying the sections that walk through history explaining how things began eroding at a rapid rate back in the 19th century … .

I told my friend, in the kindest terms I could fashion, I absolutely would not read that book.

Mr. LaHaye’s worldview is part of the problem, not the solution. Here is my rather long-winded reaction to my friend:

Let me mention one major problem that LaHaye would naturally leave out of his book. Before the mid to late 19th century, Christians almost universally believed that the church would be triumphant and would gradually grow in influence over the years. They would cite passages such as Luke 13:18-21:

“He said therefore, ‘What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.’And again he said, ‘To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.'”

But during the 19th century, a novel idea occurred, that the church would NOT triumph, but that instead its influence would wane and grow less until the end, when the church is vacuumed off the earth in a “rapture,” followed by seven years of tribulation during which there would be no faithful witness for the gospel on earth.

As this pessimistic worldview grew in dominance, the church increasingly drew inward, concentrating more on “spiritual” things and less on the passing cares of this world, since, let’s face, the world’s going to Hell in a handbasket.

So I’d say that it is the pessimistic, God-ain’t-THAT-sovereign, “Left Behind” theology of LaHaye that let the secular humanists fill the vacuum of influence and power that the church once employed.

Yep, the secular humanists get a bad rap. They wouldn’t have been able to do anything if the church hadn’t abandoned her post.